⚠️ Apps are an Alpha feature and still in development. What an app can do, the steps in this article, and the tools behind them may change, and an app that works today may break after a Luminovo update.
Overview
An App is a small browser application that runs inside Luminovo and belongs to your tenant. You describe what you want to your AI assistant, for example Claude or ChatGPT, and the assistant builds the app for you through the MCP. You do not write any code yourself.
A full-page app gets its own page in Luminovo, at an address that starts with /apps/, for example /apps/open-projects. It opens like any other Luminovo screen and appears in the navigation once it is released. Use one when you want a view of your data that Luminovo does not offer yet, such as a dashboard for your team or a list built around how you work.
An app shows up in Luminovo in one of these ways. This article covers full-page apps.
A full-page app is a page with its own route beside the product’s navigation.
A container app fills a region of an existing page, for example the sidebar on a customer’s details page.
A tab app adds one more tab to a tab bar the page already has.
A button adds an entry to a menu the page already has, for example the Apps menu of the projects table, and runs a task on what you are looking at.
All four are available today. A button can sit in the Apps menu of a table or in another menu a page already has, such as the ... menu of a calculation.
Everyone in your tenant can open a released app. It always runs with the permissions of the person who opens it, so each colleague sees only the data they are allowed to see.
ℹ️ If you build an app, you are responsible for it. That covers the code you or your assistant writes, what the app does, and keeping it working. Luminovo is responsible for its platform: the data and API endpoints the app calls, and the MCP tools your assistant uses to build it. Errors in the app’s own code, its settings and permissions, or an external data source it connects to are yours to fix, and your Customer Success Manager can guide you.
Where to find it
You build the app in a conversation with your AI assistant, not in the Luminovo web app.
Once it is released, you open the app in Luminovo at its own page. Go to /apps on your tenant to reach the App Directory, which lists every app available to you.
Prerequisites
Your AI assistant is connected to Luminovo through the MCP. See Connect your AI assistant to Luminovo with the MCP.
The connection points at the tenant the app should belong to. One connection covers one tenant.
There is nothing to install and no developer account to set up.
Step-by-step guide
1. Ask your assistant to build the app
Start a new conversation and describe the page you want: what it should show, who will use it, and what they should be able to do there. Say “full-page app” so the assistant knows you want a page of its own.
Your assistant first loads Luminovo’s guide for building apps (the how-to-build-apps skill) and then works through it. It may ask you a few questions, such as a name for the app or which projects to include. Answer them as you would for a colleague.
Example prompts you can copy and adapt:
“Build a full-page app called Open projects that lists all my projects that are still in progress, with customer, due date and status, sorted by due date.”
“Build a full-page app that shows the parts with the longest lead times across my active projects, so our buyers can see what to order first.”
“Build a full-page app where I pick a supplier and see the quotes we received from them in the last six months, with prices and lead times.”
2. Preview the draft
Everything your assistant builds is stored as a draft first. A brand-new app has no page for your colleagues until you release it, and for an existing app they keep seeing the current release.
To see the draft, open the app’s page in Luminovo and add ?lumi_draft=true to the end of the address, for example /apps/open-projects?lumi_draft=true. If you are not sure of the address, ask your assistant for the link.
Check the page with real data. If something is wrong or missing, tell your assistant what to change. Each change becomes a new draft, so you can repeat this step as often as you like.
ℹ️ The draft is not private. Anyone in your tenant who adds ?lumi_draft=true to the address sees and can use the newest draft.
3. Release the app
When the draft looks right, ask your assistant to release it, and tell it what the release notes should say. A release makes this version the one everyone in your tenant gets.
The release notes appear under What’s new in the App Directory for everyone who can see the app, so write them for your colleagues and leave out anything confidential.
4. Check the released app
Open the same address again without ?lumi_draft=true. This is what your colleagues see now.
Share and maintain your app
You are the first maintainer of every app you build. Only maintainers can change or release an app, and you can ask your assistant to add colleagues as maintainers. Everyone else in your tenant can still open and use it.
To undo a release, ask your assistant to release an earlier version again. If you run more than one Luminovo tenant, you can also share an app into another tenant.
For maintainers, sharing and rolling back, see Release, share and maintain your MCP apps.
Store your own data with custom fields
An app can keep its own values on records in Luminovo. These values are called custom fields. For example, an app can give a supplier a rating, or mark a BOM item as approved for sourcing, and show or change that value later.
Custom fields work on these records:
Customers
Projects
Components (IPNs)
Suppliers
BOM items
Off-the-shelf parts
For now, custom fields are only visible inside apps. The regular Luminovo pages do not show them, and there is no setting to create them by hand.
A typical use is tracking why you win or lose projects. Luminovo already counts won and lost projects, but it does not record why you lost or who won instead. An app can ask for the loss reason and the competitor when a project is lost, save both on the project, and later show across all projects which customers you lose on price, and to whom.
Ask your assistant for it in plain words, for example:
“Build an app that lets me rate my suppliers and saves the rating on each supplier.”
Your assistant defines the custom field and writes the values for you.
Use an AI model in your app
An app can call an AI model by itself, for example to summarize the data on the page, structure free text or score a list of entries. Luminovo provides the model, so you do not need an AI account or an API key of your own.
Ask your assistant for it in plain words, for example:
“Add a short summary to my app. Connect to an AI model and summarize the data shown on the page.”
The answer appears while the model writes it, like a chat reply. The model can also return data instead of text, which the app turns into a table, a chart, a score or prefilled fields.
Your app uses one or more of four model classes: fast, balanced, capable and reasoning. They range from quick and inexpensive to slower and more thorough. Each app lists the classes it uses.
Model calls count against a monthly spending limit for your tenant. When the limit is used up, the app tells you when it resets. You cannot yet see how much of the limit is left.
For quick triage, an app can also use the decision model class. It answers a question about one record, such as a project or a part, with a number instead of text. It handles three kinds of question:
Yes or no, returned as a probability, for example whether a customer’s request asks for a rush delivery
One label from a list you give it, with the model’s confidence, for example which part category a part belongs to
A rating on a scale the app defines, such as Low, Medium, and High, for example how complex a quote will be
An app can ask several questions about the same record at once and usually gets the answers in about half a second. Its calls count against the same monthly spending limit, and the numbers can differ slightly when you ask the same question twice. You can use the decision model in a new app or add it to one you already have, for example:
“Use the decision model to badge my recent projects by complexity.”
ℹ️ The model only answers. It cannot use the MCP tools or change anything in Luminovo by itself; your app decides what happens with the answer.
Give your app an agent
An app can also run its own agent that works through a task step by step. The app hands the model some of its own functions as tools, for example one that filters the table on the page or one that changes a due date. The model decides which tools to call, the app runs them, and this repeats until the task is done. That way the agent can look things up, change what is shown on the page and propose changes for you to approve.
An agent like this belongs to one app and is built for your use case. It is not Lumi, Luminovo’s own AI assistant.
An agent can run in three places:
In a chat panel inside the app, which shows every step while the agent works
Behind a button in the app, for example one that briefs you on a project
In a workflow that runs on its own, without anyone at the screen
For fixed-shape judgements the agent can use the decision model as one of its tools, for example to rate the urgency of 25 records in a few seconds, or to make a bid or no-bid call with its confidence.
Ask your assistant for an agent in plain words, for example:
“Add an agent to my app that filters the table and changes due dates after I approve.”
Your assistant then loads Luminovo’s guide for app agents (the building-app-agents skill) by itself. Built that way, the agent asks for your approval before every change it writes, stops after a set number of steps and suggests questions you can ask next.
The model itself still changes nothing in Luminovo. It only picks the tools; your app runs them.
Good to know
An app keeps no database of its own. It shows and changes data in Luminovo, including its custom fields, so it can only work with information Luminovo holds or with an outside service it is approved to call.
Before an app can call a service outside Luminovo, Luminovo reviews and approves that connection once. Until then, calls to that service fail.
Every app shows a connection icon, two linked squares, next to its name, so you can tell an app apart from a built-in Luminovo feature.
An app that sits inside an existing page appears 1 to 5 seconds after the page loads, while it starts. You can use the page in the meantime.
Getting help
Stuck, or not sure whether your idea fits an app? Email us at [email protected], or use the chat button in the bottom-right corner of your workspace.